Intricate Definitions
by Silvara
Summary: Alan made a point to bring out an old program too intricately tangled in Kevin's mainframe for its survival. He never imagined that its mere existence would tear his brain in so many ways at once. "Flynn didn't realize it, did he... Had he any idea how much the Basics could be fascinating...?" — A collection of chapters with variable time gaps. HIATUS
1. Intricate Definitions 0001

_AN: This is something that I've written for a while. Xeno/grey asexual Alan/Tron. W_ _e're gone for quite a long very much philosophical ride with it. _

_I tried to remain faithful to the canons to some degree. If anything doesn't make sense compared with the movies, let me know please. I hope this tale can bring you as much reading entertainment as they were writing._

 _Warnings: Bad science. Random philosophic ideas. My strange French grammar._

* * *

.

.

Sure, Alan was thrilled, felt as intrigued as his first day at Encom and everything. And sure, Tron had always been very dear to him, but very soon, the only thing he saw staring back at him in unblinking devotion became a huge complication to the balance of his sanity.

"Perhaps it would be easier to just consider him your son?"

Alan left his pad to give his spouse a bland look, only getting a stifled chuckle in return.

"Or maybe not a child, but a brother? A twin?"

Alan held her glace for a moment and then sighed, laying the pad down on their blanket. "It's ridiculous, I know it is!" Lora pushed her pillow higher and propelled herself on an elbow to clutch his hand. "But he's—Tron is… Tron! He is not my son, and don't even get me begun about the twin thing. He is a program, no matter whose looks he has, he—he is my program." He sighted. "Don't say anything," he pleaded.

Lora grinned, now feeling like a schoolgirl. "It doesn't seem much different on our network. Whether he comes or you go, biological or not…"

"It's not about—it's just—I..."

"It's only complicated if you make it so. I though you used to enjoy exploring new grounds..."

A strange expression arose on the ex programmer's face. "Like feeling your program up?"

Lora stood speechless, mouth agape for a few seconds before swallowing. "I didn't— It..." Blushing, she shot her husband a dark glare and playfully punched his arm. "I thought I explained that already!" _at least I don't speak to her in command lines,_ she though, which she immediately regretted.

"At least I don't stare at her as is if she is might explode," she countered.

Alan tensed and a silence swept across the bed, sobering her at once.

Lora admitted it might have been a little harsh to make fun of it. He was already taking his relationship with Tron bad enough as it was. Besides, she understood only too well why Alan would be terrified by his proximity to a program he used—never mind that it was Tron, a real sized avatar of his youthful ideals, or that Tron actually shared his face—but Lora had long gotten over her own existential complexes with the portable version of Yori she upgraded on her laptop from Encom's archives. by now and Tron seemed just as happy as Yori to spend time with their Users, so why was Alan taking face to face interactions with the program so badly?

Perhaps the topic was too personal, too narcissist to be threaded on lightly. If Lora was being honest with herself, neither of them was ready to open up about it, long married couple or not. Her eyes dotted on the pad resting between them. For all the oedipal turmoil they had experienced, the program did not seem to care a second about putting a status on their relations with them. Of anything, Alan and her needed to find some common rules or something, before pretty errors were done and awkward regrets ensued.

She looked up at him and felt terribly bad when he avoided her eyes. Lying back down on the bed, she sighted and tentatively reached for his hand.

"Well, I don't stare _anymore_ ," she tried to amend, "So I can't hold it against you, and," her voice trailed fainter, "we both know they don't either."

On his system, Flynn had implemented a special chatbot feature to what they called the I/O towers; a crazy and brilliant idea—just like its inventor, Alan thought with a bittersweet taste in the mouth—so now, through they still could not process all of the concepts the English language offered, the "Grid" programs were granted a more "user friendly" mode of output through a simplified somewhat rigid syntax. It was while debugging Tron's code, and exchanging a few words with his program, that he had begun to add credit to Sam's story.

When he realized there was reason behind the trick: nothing in the code of the chatbot protocol justified half the nuances in his program's outputs...

He swore, memories of SF reads and asimovian tales already swirling in his head.

It was not so much the idea of speaking and playing chess with a program that made Alan nervous, but he had yet to get used to the fact that the program was such an accurate copy of his younger body, with his own mannerisms and values. He had been enthusiast to meet him at first, but the initial curiosity quickly left place to a magnetic repulsion, which only began very slowly to dissipate through the week.

Actually meeting Tron could have felt like meeting a twin of sort, except it was anything but a twin, despite everything Flynn had theorized about the Grid in his books. Meeting his program has been a familiar and alien sensation at the same time, as many other things. However, most of all, for all of his rationality and scientific mind, it still felt terribly uncanny.

Not only was it a younger copy of himself—with the strength, the agility, and the fresh hopeful views he lost...—but Tron has been—was—a fragment of himself: a segment of his life in which he had put the best of his knowledge, thinking and feelings.

The result was simply fascinating. And yet...Alan did not know if imprinting his own ideals into what looked like a full-fledged, nearly sentient being didn't make him some sort of dictator in the end, but it was surely a bit narcissist, wasn't it?

On the digital world, it had not really made a difference, since directives were the only thing allowing programs to…run. Their feelings only born and grew off their main purpose. Directives gave them purpose and they were happy with it.

Sadly, neither Quorra, Sam, nor any of Flynn's books could explain what made a program over another more curious of its surroundings and own needs. What could make Tron say " _my diagnostic returns an inadequacy_ ", "my diagnostic returns a great purpose", while meaning " _I am worried_ " or " _I am happy_ "?

It was surrealist.

The first time he arrived on the analog plane, without the I/O chatbot translations, Tron has only been able to communicate using a keyboard at first. Alan could not stifle a laugh when he saw his program answer the most complexes questions in typed Assembly.

He laughed much less, through, when he tried to decipher the low-level language himself; then with a decompiler; to grasp half of what Tron's loops meant.

It was even more frustrating that there were many questions Alan had for Tron, half of which the program was probably unable to answer, sure, but still!

He would have to wait for Sam to stabilize Flynn's system enough and get _rezzed_ in himself to be able to communicate better.

Fortunately, Tron has showed extraordinary memory abilities; enough to memorize and process audio inputs as soon as he heard them. At that rate, Alan and Lora had little to do before he managed to express himself effectively enough in his User's native language in a very fair delay.

It took a little longer to get Tron to actually leave keyboards alone and voice the words himself. The program also had to get over the miss of the telepathic like senses that his permanent connection to the System usually granted him.

Presented with all of the English verbs, Tron still insisted to use computer terms to express himself and refer to other programs. Lora put it on the sake of some religious code or self-depreciation. Eventually, Sam stopped Tron in the middle of a statement.

"You _think_ , man. Just say _you think_ , that's the world for it. Processing doesn't make sense least you are some kind of..."

"Program," Tron finished. "I see no purpose in referring to myself with User terms, Samflynn."

The young man sighed. "It's just Sam."

"Fact that I _feel_ and _live_ as you would say, Justsam," Tron amended, "does not stop me from being an anti-malware... _software_. I am not currently active on a System but my memory and behavior are configured according to the last Grid I was rezzed on."

"Still," Alan intervened as Lora softly chuckled, "For most of us, the idea we associate to the terms you use suggest acts devoid of any will or consciousness."

"Then, if you think it is a problem, the logical thing to change would be the Users' idea of these terms," he said bluntly, "not what the programs are and call themselves."

Alan still had their last conversation fresh on his mind. Despite being familiar with the program's mind, his vocabulary would often slip and Tron would be forced to ask for a definition. Among those words stood Freedom, and the horror that befallen the security program at its explanation.

Thinking about these things the next morning as he waited for Lora to leave him the shower, Alan could admit that absolute freedom was an impossible concept, severance of all bonds being a hell of itself even for the human mind.

Therefore, once he was alone with Tron again, he described the sensations that freedom was supposed to cause instead. "These feelings come with purpose," the program had commented then, "When I follow a direction most compatible with my directives, then I feel free."

After some thought and to Alan's amusement, Tron added, "I think it also applies for every programs running on Flynn's Grid...and on Encom old mainframe."

It sounded only logical. Moreover, it eased many of the programmer's worries. Nevertheless, logic and facts soon proved insufficient to quell Alan's complexes.


	2. Intricate Definitions 0010

.

"What are your incentives, Tron?" he found himself asking on a late Sunday afternoon at Flynn's arcade. Sam and Quorra left early, and a pizza box lay empty on the coffee table.

Alan knew he threaded on pins and needles when it came to philosophy; they had found that relativity seriously upset programs. Since Quorra still found the idea very hard to asset, they decided to avoid philosophy altogether around them. Nevertheless, the question was nagging at him and he found he could not ignore it anymore. Sometimes, when Tron would smile, when he saw hope and trust in eyes that he could decipher better than his own, or when the program confessed the pettiest of his glitches in a dramatic voice before an update, Alan felt like an imposter.

My first directive is to monitor data and deal with threats, according to the mainframe User admin—"

"Yes, I—" _know_. "But what is your general purpose?"

After a while, Tron stated, "I have been compiled to protect the systems; to insure that users and programs input and output according to their permissions; to defend the users' safety among everything else."

There was no ounce of doubt in his voice. Alan weighted the answer. He had implemented a strict hierarchy to secure his programming; and recently read and probed the tweaked and cracked handlers of all tiers countless times to re-patch Tron from Rinzler's leftovers.

Left without any signs of approbation, the program became a little edgy and pursued on. "I...used to fight for the Users, when two A.I. glitched and harmed them." His voice quivered even so slightly by the end of his statement.

Alan patted on his arm with a friendly smile. "Tried to harm them." He corrected with a smile. "In fact, that's not quite what I meant to ask." (When Tron did not object his obvious lie, he heaved a sigh.) "You must process your errors only once and punctually. You were not meant to drag them on for so long. Better leave that to us, Tron."

He sighed and came to sit on the coffee table in front of the program's stiff silhouette. As he bent to see him in the eyes, something flickered in the hexagonal shaped iris, even behind the overwhelming faith he still didn't want—couldn't comprehend. The feelings he could read there were a little terrifying of themselves, and Alan was sure he wasn't going to acknowledge them if he could help it. Feeling vertiginous, he straightened a little before smiling.

"We all grieve for our losses," agreed the program, "although we can't allow ourselves to dwell on the past for long." Tron looked him straight in the eyes. "That's how Flynn translated that instruction."

Was it? Alan blinked a couple times and released his clenched jaw. "I see." Tron quirked his head.

"I meant—"

"Abort." The program's voice died in his throat. Alan froze.

Aloud, the command line did sound ruder than he could have imagined. In his desperation to stop the surrealist conversation that was bound to ensue, it had been the first word coming to his mind...

Now that was simply ridiculous.

Lora would laugh at him. Sam...he would rather die than act so awkward in front of Sam. He needed a solution. He needed a truce with himself, with his narcissist bases.

He looked up...into a blunt glance—too intense for any human being—that tried to shallow his mind in a swirl of trust and confusion.

He averted his head.

He could very well see the choices that were now his. Diving in Encom's Board problems or taking a vacation and getting ready for a couple of relationship traumas. Somehow, phrasing it that way, his job at the company sounded twice more pleasant.

The digital world was intrinsically ruled by bipolar states of true and false; Boolean variables that didn't care for intermittent stasis. He could understand that; as much as he thought he understood the expectations of a proprietary program like Tron meeting his user...

It was not love. It was not even real affection. Only right and wrong data he clustered, that somehow compiled rules into moral obligations. Where did the construct end and where the being began? How far has his influence truly crafted and was could be accounted as authentic?

Who was he bluffing?

Whether the narcissist extend of his situation was, there was no use pondering on whether or not his relation to his sentient looking program was socially acceptable when all society standards were about to be changed by the revelation of the secret potential of the SHIVA model of lasers. If anything, Tron concerned no one but him.

The door opened. Lora casually came in. Her eyes wandered between them and stopped on him to wink.

Alan greeted his wife with his darkest glare and sighed, a little more desperate to clear his ideas, now.

The situation was absurd. He was worried about being controlling and narcissist when the matter would never be a problem to anyone but his own self esteem. In a way, his doubts were more selfish than not.

Trust Lora to cope with the weirdest of complexes as if it was a piece of cake... Or was it because she was a woman? Well, he didn't found any sign of these concerns in Flynn's books, and he could not really ask CLU 2.0 anymore...

Okay. Rules where the key and he just had to find his owns.

But then, how was he going to pass them around? For all his courage, he felt more ready to die than to discuss narcissism with his wife and even less with— _oh my_.

It was not too late to go back to Encom. He bet he could find enough problems to burrow his head into charts and forget—well, not as much—but to shush out the whole Grid concept from his mind for a whole good year with some luck.

More technically speaking, it was easy to set a list of things that would definitely repel—if not horrify—him in terms of relationship. Luckily, there was no way any program would know of the worst things he could thinking of (and he firmly decided to pretend that Flynn would never middle so far in his System to make its inhabitants anatomy similar to humans). He darted a wary appraising glance at the security program from the corner of his eyes and relaxed a bit when he didn't seem to find...whatever he thought he was dreading to find there.

Admittedly, the quicker way to pass off rules was still to take the lead. Maybe that was why the program has never expressed anything personal until now...

Absurd.

For all of his...sentience, the program could never have enough memory and CPU allocation to thread on such complex problems. Alan's eyes jumped to Tron's silhouette. _Had he?_

Nah, it was his imagination.

Just like the idea that terror, awe and eagerness in his eyes drew Tron's gestures to be deliberately slow and purposeful. _Just his imagination._

All in all, his imagination really had to be a wild thing...

Alan silently snickered at himself. He took off his glasses to clean them with his shirt and got distracted by the lasagna aroma coming from the kitchen. As soon as Lora's voice asked him about his day he stood to give her a warmer greeting.

* * *

 _A/N: The story is in Hiatus after this chapter. There are any more chapters to go, and most are already written, but they have to be sown in order, patched together, have some blanks filled in, and...and the sad story is that I've got a thousands others things to do. I'll resume posting this once I find some motivation or enough feedback to get motivation._

 _Still I wanted to post this as an idea, a sort of headcanon to share. Thank you for reading so far._


	3. Temporary Files 01

_A/N: In which a routine debugging mission turns sour for both Alan and Tron. (This chapter's events fit much later than the previous ones.)_

* * *

.

Whenever Alan had joined the program he trusted most on the Grid, Tron had always been untreatable about his security. It even got to the point that he had to cast a protective shield on himself even _before_ entering a sector that displayed the barest of unstabilities.

The two times Alan had tried to talk his program out of his protective streak had put Tron in a sulking mode. This, so far, had entailed having a security program fretting over the tiniest system errors, acting overly formal, and sometimes, if the _Basic_ felt especially moody, even talking in the robotic way of the _Sparkless,_ those simple programs who had never been gifted a Spark by their Users. As if Tron couldn't feel or understand human emotions...

If anything, this had proved quite effective to make Alan feel bad. And restricted. And exasperated.

Still, he had relented to indulge his program. As he had gotten used to read Tron's logs from Grid–level, Alan had grown to grasp the uncanily painful uncomfort Tron felt when he knew his creator to be in danger...

In fact, this once, it was this very timing in the activation of his shield which had prevented bugs – nasty viscious creatures as those were – from recognizing him as an entity made of corruptible code.

Apparently, the pattern of a user's circuitry was too complex, too _different_ for the intelligence of the bug's spawns. After Tron had fallen, they had lost interest in the fight, stopping their few feeble attempts against his shield to creep away, looking for easier prey to contaminate on what was left of the sector.

Still, with heir corrosive goo eating grooves into the very format of the ground everywhere they crawled, it became clear that before long, it was the whole sector that would become lost.

Alan knew from experience that he would not be fast enough to save any of the other _Basics_ who worked there any more than he could save Tron.

He turned to the fallen body of his program and sagged on his knees, his hands hovering above the _Basic's_ shoulders. For the first time since he had first used a computer keyboard, Alan felt useless. Lonely.

.

What had begun as a simple debugging mission lead to facing a spreading disaster at the frontier of some obscure sector framed by the Sea Of Simulation.

Before they had realized that the bug could develop itself, Tron had been touched. As they were, both separated and completely surrounded, it had been a matter of time for the program to fall.

"No! [I can repair this... I just]—[I _commend_ you to _hold on]_!" Alan demanded, his low voice booming through the shattering sector with Grid-level authority. "[Damn it, just give me some _time_ , Tron], he begged.

The User's fingers pressed hard into his program's chest, where the goo had not yet spread until energy glowed a bright white around his palm.

A warmth surged from the passing energy, breaking through the program's internal feed of red flagged warnings as he kept falling apart, clusters of bytes at a time.

Tron couldn't stop a whimper as he desperately clutched on the link that his secret attentions toward his User were now tinting purple. He looked up, parsing Alan–one's features again. His eyes briefly dotted on the complicated pattern that made the circuitry on a user's clothes, the same that was imprinted in the energy he focused on sending him.

As he transmitted him energy, and his circuit color glared between them, the program felt the flicker of an old nagging question...but perhaps his programmer had a wise and otherworldly reason to willingly ignore this layer of his devotion.

Able to function fully for his last time thanks to his User, Tron focused. He pushed Alan's arm from his chest, cutting off the generous flow now a pale pink.

Before Alan could protest, the program lifted a trembling hand to his back, then presented him with his IDisk.

"[Restore me], he simply pointed out. Yet his voice struggled to phrase the so simple solution.

The bug finally crept on his face pushing still against the user's shield, minutely clipping his extended arm.

Alan took the disk, bringing it inside his shield before the dark goo could cripple Tron's extended arm. The appendage fell but there was nothing left of it when it touched the ground.

Alan gripped the disk with both hands and immediately called forth data. A grid-level interface rezzed above the spherical device and the programmer commended the data to freeze, preventing the corruption from spreading and turned to the body of his program.

"[Tron]-" he called desperately, unsure of what to do.

"[Leave]."

What remained of the program's body mouthed the word, but the sound came so ugly and distorted that he wasn't sure what it was. Tron used the last contact he had to Alan to open a direct link and sent forth only one process.

[Your shield works with _my_ functions], he reminded, annoyed, pawing at Alan's horrified mind before he was but a small ball of energy holding together only from cheer will. [ _Now_ ]!

Alan jumped to his feet, fighting to make his feet work and leave everything of the corrupt district behind. He crossed the gate of the next district just in time before the energy of his shield fliked off.

The shield was one of his program's features... of those he had been able to use through special grid-level permissions Tron had gifted him soon after they had met on the Grid.

Alan didn't have the courage to try to raise another one, because it would have meant finding out whether Tron still has energy. Or bits held together.

Every time he had rezzed on a System, he had relied on his program's skills for more tasks that he could recount. Without them, there was little he could do to clean the system from the inside...

He looked around himself to assess his options, his feet moving him before his brain could.

The bugs created a great strain on live memory and the Kernel would have overrode any call for a Jet, so Alan walked all the way back to the road and called for the next transport line to return to the Portal.

The line was clogged up with traffic. His return trip was so slow it became agonizing. Even if he was a user, could and would help the system, its Kernel was still stubborn about the attribution of admin powers. And so, only the users who had upper level permissions before rezzing-up onGrid were allowed to requisition energy as they saw fit during system wide crisis. Alan simply hadn't seen the need to open an elevated session on the supercomputer before the laser sent him in.

And no one was behind the terminal to save him. Alan covered his face.

How had he let the situation become to this? He had been so confident about Tron and about himself... Even if things had been well for dozens of months, it didn't excuse that kind of mistake. _Not after Kevin._

He knew he would be able to make up for lost time once he was once again behind a keyboard... But that small reassurance didn't ease his unrest. He tried his best not to think about what had just happened.

.

It didn't take Alan long to erase and restore the lost sector. He even managed to find the source of the bug and the cause for its spreading.

Not that it did much good to his nerves, though.

Even after he was done, Alan looked at the directory that was now Tron's IDisk left on the safe external drive they used to rez in when they used the laser... The thing was that there was a small chance —small but not so tiny— that he would be quick enough to erase the bug still lodged in there before it damaged a core function and irrevocably damaged its contents.

The user knew the concern was silly; especially since he had made three copies of the directory already and one of them was a protected a zipped file, and yet, yet—he had seen Tron die!—his fingers wouldn't quit shaking every time he selected the directory.

.∵.

His User was watching him as if he had generated a second body from his IDisk (the idiom was silly but it was the first that had come to his main-process).

When Tron woke up from the pod at his office, Alan-one had been there, and the user had watched his every movement with a kind of extreme awe doubled with sadness.

"Alan-one," he pinged, unsure of whether to mention it or not. but worry began to run his circuitry and he frowned.

"[Greetings], Alan–one... [What is-" he noticed something strange with the system clock. "Is there an error with the current timestamp]?"

"No." The user's answer came as low as a breath.

Tron frowned. "[Oh]."

Then the line of processing reached a conclusion and his eyes widened this time. _"[Oh]._ "

Tron glanced down at his hands, carefully touched his port, eyebrows drawn together in a humbled worry.

"[Is the threat continuing]?"

"No."

He watched his User and felt satisfied about the answer. "[Good]."

As soon as his frame eased into a more collected stance, Tron felt his User grab his interface and pull it into him, locking arms in a _dead's grip_ around his shoulders.

Not sure of what humans were supposed to do when they were being mashed up to one another without an apparent purpose, the program ventured another query, grasping for data.

"[Are you intact]?"

"Yes..." Yet, his prompt triggered something in Alan-one's audio output. From the little he knew about users, the program understood that His _voice_ didn't sound collected at all.

He frowned, not completely daring to chide his User.

"No, you're not."

So Tron ran his pointers and put the bits together, emulating the scenario of what must have been the state of his User's own processes until he woke on ( _once again_ , his live memory supplied).

"[Yet, your concerns are needless," he humbly chided his User, pulling him at arm length to meet his...eyes with a stare. "Am I not functional, here, right in front of you]? [I am well, Alan-one]. [You saved me]."

The outline of his User sag further as he shook his eyes, a ghost of his horror blurring his eyes.

"[But I saw you _die_ ]..."

"And [you brought me back]," Tron completed with a confident smile and a shrugged. "I thought you would."

Alan-one blinked, crossed his arms together, bit a nail, then shook his head once again.

"[But, what about the version of you that I let to die? What has become of...him]..." he finished miserably.

Tron thought hard and quickly. Time and experiences had taught him better than any simulations, but he still wasn't built to work on heuristics and after his experiences with KevinFlynn and Clu2 he was as close to hating doing so as a program could hate anything.

Despite of it, he did his best and gathered every data he could to offer his User what he hoped to be a humane solution.

"[The bits that made him had returned to the sea. But it is very unlikely that his...spark has taken the same route]. [When we first came online on the Grid, do you remember how the...System was itching to bring us together, assuming we were two occurrences of the same entity]?"

Alan-one nodded, to Tron's relief. The program went on.

"[Well, the most likely solution for the system to deal with his spark would be to bring it back to my IDisk.] [Failing that, back to my running session]," he finished, gesturing to his grid-level interface; his body.

Alan considered this.

"[Then you think he might be part of you now...somehow]?" he mused, obviously trying to reassure himself. "[Even though the bugs of epsilon-fifty-two didn't left any trace of his session]?"

At these words something stirred in the back of Tron's code. Something new and disturbing, tugging like a forgotten ghost session that caught up with the live run.

He went to his User and lifted a hand to touch his head, palm on his temple. [Reprint your last prompt again]... he requested nervously, finding himself also in awe now.

Alan-one reiterated his exact words and gasped as he felt the program's strange sensation trigger again at the mention of the way his older version had derezzed. The sensation was of a weaker intensity now, but clear enough for Alan as it echoed between them through the direct line that linked their processes.

Alan-one stared in mild shock and with something like wonder.

Once more, Tron found his User's arms around him, the clutch just as fierce, yet more steady now.

"[I didn't die, Alan-one. I _derezzed]_ , he patiently pointed out, returning awkwardly the hug.

[Most importantly, _you_ _lived]_ , he developed, [and as long as _you_ will live, my User, so can _I]_ ," he affirmed without a trace of doubt, confident in his trust and in his statement.

Well...there _was_ the matter of his User not having come to him in twenty years of fragmenting hell and prayers.

However, now, Tron understood _why_ it occurred...and since Alan-one had reliving most of his memories as His own, Tron had not kept his feelings secret. He had made sure that his user would remember his only will; the sole thing he demanded from Him.

For months now, Alan-one's answer to his demand has been there, solid sleeping code lain between the larger processes in his identity disk; one of the most precious parts of his code after these twenty years...

In the first place, Alan-one had been deeply upset, and had required him to promise a lot of things before he agreed to give the update. But now, the command was here, real, and under handler reach. And even though he would have to go through many self-diagnostics first to be able to access it, it would also activate without delay at the first unwelcome attempt to alter his code; his own lethal promise of freedom.

He felt a surge of gratefulness for Alan-one, for the entity who had created him byte by byte; had bestowed him his powers, had endowed him with a Spark, and had now gifted him with the greatest choice…

.

After a while, Tron felt his User nod cautiously against his hair.

The program strengthened his embrace, letting love literally bleed from his circuits, sharing overflowing excess of happiness and energy in dark blue and purple shades.

He felt Alan-one jolt imperceptibly at the different energies and held his pointers, trying to keep his emotions in check as not to overwhelm the user.

Relief and joy flooded him when he noticed that Alan-one wasn't pushing away. He knew better than to take this layer of intimacy as granted. Roles and places of users and programs didn't allow it. Even the _Spark_ , this holy bond between Users and their own programs remained limitated by the different flows of time that ruled their respective worlds, if not by different customs and ways regarding affection. (Tron had learnt as much from Clu.2.0 and Flynn.)

Carefully, tentatively, he committed the experience to memory, just as he made sure to make the best of this raw link by conveying to his User everything he had never known to express any other way...

Barely a mili-cycle seemed to have passed when Alan-one drew back to hold him at _arm–length_ with a worrisome new determination flaring in his eyes. Not exactly the reaction he had expected (although he hadn't known what to expect in the first time).

"[I've got backups of you to check]. [And lock], [and isolate]. [I'll be back at the tower tomorrow]. [Alright]?"

He barely had time to return an affirmate before his User blinked out, self-derezzing to be rerouted to His source directory on the dedicated external drive. Tron's pointers skipped a node, half-heartedly resenting that the system had enough energy to allow that ridiculously dangerous method again.

Just as he couldn't figure the logic by which Alan-one kept doubting of His powers when it came to His creation, for the sake of his core, the security program would never get used to this dement function Quorra had built to fast-travel...

Addressing a silent snort to the paradoxical ways in which users thought, Tron shook his head and returned to the reports waiting on his desk, helplessely aware of the fond smile stuck on his facial display.

Feeling 'light-hearted' like he had just been activated and was taking his first steps alone on the Grid, the program whistled a airy tune; a vague melody fetched between some blurry lines of his oldest memories while he resumed his work, the whole incident already sorted and safely stored somewhere on the back of his office.

After all, his User was _safe_.

.∵.

Outside of the Grid, in the artistic chaos of another world, Alan Bradley laid on his bed, eyes ajar, bright with emotion.

In the dark, the conceptor's fingers searched for an intangible input device, itching to pass a command just out of reach. Slowly he worked himself to become calm before he dared to close his eyes.

In the end, sleep caugh him more easily than he had expected.

His hands wobbled one last time in the dark emptiness before they cautiously set on the white sheets.

Yes, Tron was _intact_.


End file.
